Wage Labour and Capital
Wage Labour and Capital (German: Lohnarbeit und Kapital) is an essay on economics written in 1847 by Karl Marx composed of lectures delivered by him to the German Workingmen's Club of Brussels in the same year. It was first published in articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in April 1849. It is widely considered to be the precursor to Marx's influential treatise Das Kapital.[1] In this work, Marx delivers an in-depth economic and scientific observation on how the capitalist economy works, why it is exploitative, and why it will eventually implode from within.
In 1891 Friedrich Engels revised the work and added an Introduction to account for Marx's later development of the theory of labour power and its role in resolving the contradiction between the labour theory of value and the theory of exploitation:
How is the value of “labour” determined? By the necessary labour embodied in it. But how much labour is embodied in the labour of a labourer of a day a week, a month, a year. If labour is the measure of all values, we can express the “value of labour” only in labour. But we know absolutely nothing about the value of an hour’s labour, if all that we know about it is that it is equal to one hour’s labour. So, thereby, we have not advanced one hair’s breadth nearer our goal; we are constantly turning about in a circle.
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References
- ↑ Marx, Karl; Engels, Friedrich (1978). Tucker, Robert C. (ed.). The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.). London: W. W. Norton & Company. p. 203. ISBN 978-0-393-09040-6.
It may be said that what Marx produced in the lectures of late 1847 was the future argument of Capital in embryo.